For years, the best way to get 10 gigabit networking on laptops was to buy an expensive, large, and hot 10 GbE Thunderbolt adapter. With new RTL8159-based 10G USB 3.2 adapters coming onto the market, the bulky adapters might be a thing of the past. Just look at the size of the thing in comparison to my Thunderbolt adapters:
2.5G and even 5G USB adapters have been out for a while, but sometimes you need more bandwidth. For years, the best way to get 10 gigabit networking on laptops was...
I don’t think there’s compelling evidence that using AI makes you less intelligent overall 1 . However, it seems pretty obvious that using AI to perform a task means you don’t learn as much about performing that task . Some software engineers think this is a decisive argument against the use of AI. Their argument goes something like this:
Using AI means you don’t learn as much from your work
AI-users thus become less effective engineers over time, as their technical skills atrophy...
Not long ago we looked at construction productivity trends for the US and for countries around the world . We found that in the US, and in most other large, wealthy countries, construction productivity is stagnant or declining. Unlike manufacturing and agriculture, or the economy overall, which generally show improving productivity over time, in the field of construction we find that productivity tends to at best stay constant, and at worst decline over time. Understanding trends in productiv...
I like to walk quickly. One of my childhood friends did, too. Whenever I reflect on the pace at which I walk, I think of the times when we tried to walk as fast as possible. My friend was much more athletic than I – with longer legs, too – so they often had the edge in walking speed. I loved trying to be quick anyway. Now, I have the joy of walking bringing back those memories. When I notice something out in the world, I often stop in my tracks, eager to see or hear as much of what I have no...
Computing technology is one of the greatest levers humanity has ever created. We’ve built nanometer scale circuitry that operates in units of billionths of a second. Networks connect people around the globe (and beyond) at near-lightspeed. Almost our entire culture from foundational scientific papers to family photographs can be brought up on little glass panels we carry in our pockets. Recent breakthroughs in artificial intelligence allow us to engage this technology not just through strict s...
We’re ramping up again to launch the Build Awesome (11ty) Kickstarter Final_FINAL_v2 on April 28, 2026 and in this post I make the case for a new web site builder can layer itself on top of your existing projects as a progressive enhancement. Infrastructure as progressive enhancement!
Launching April 28 .
We’re ramping up again to launch the Build Awesome (11ty) Kickstarter Final_FINAL_v2 on April 28, 2026 and in this post I make the case for a new web site builder can layer i...
My experience on a five day alpinism course to the Grossvenediger. My experience on a five day alpinism course to the Grossvenediger.
Something I didn't understand for a while is that the process of turning row-oriented data into column-oriented data isn't a totally bespoke, foreign concept in the realm of databases. It's still of the relational abstraction. Or can be.
As an example, say we have this data:
data = [
{ "name" : "Smudge" , "colour" : "black" },
{ "name" : "Sissel" , "colour" : "grey" },
{ "name" : "Hamlet" , "colour" : "black" }
]
This represents a tab...
Chinese AI lab DeepSeek's last model release was V3.2 (and V3.2 Speciale) last December . They just dropped the first of their hotly anticipated V4 series in the shape of two preview models, DeepSeek-V4-Pro and DeepSeek-V4-Flash .
Both models are 1 million token context Mixture of Experts. Pro is 1.6T total parameters, 49B active. Flash is 284B total, 13B active. They're using the standard MIT license.
I think this makes DeepSeek-V4-Pro the new largest open weights model. It's larger tha...
“Memory is not what the heart desires. That is only a mirror.”
― The Lord of the Rings
Queenstown is a small town with a population of under 30.000. However, with hundreds of thousands of people visiting this town each year, it's one of the biggest tourist hotspots in New Zealand. There are two main reasons: it's an entry point to the Milford Sound, and there are all sorts of thrilling and relaxing activities you can imagine. I only managed to visit the town for around two days due t...
This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Nicolas Solerieu, whose blog can be found at slrncl.com/blog .
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Let's start from the basics: can you introduce yourself?
I’m dad, designer, cyclist, designer, t...
If you spend enough time in US business or finance conversations, one word keeps
showing up: equity .
Coming from a German-speaking, central European background, I found it
surprisingly hard to fully internalize what that word means. More than that, I
find it very hard to talk with other
Europeans about it. Worst
of all it’s almost impossible to explain it in German without either sounding
overly technical or losing an important part of the meaning.
This post is in English, but it is ...
Articles on Chandrayaan 1, India’s first Moon mission
jatan.spaceChandrayaan 1 spacecraft illustration. Image: TeamIndus Looking back at Chandrayaan 1 and forward to Artemis How NASA and India discovered water on our Moon Interviewing Chandrayaan 1’s Mission Director How Chandrayaan 1 viewed a solar eclipse from the Moon Tangent: Kids in South Korea and a Moon mission
Like my efforts to provide free...
When I was working on the WASM backend for my Scheme compiler ,
I ran into several tricky situations with debugging generated WASM code. It
turned out that Chrome has a very capable WASM debugger in its DevTools, so in
this brief post I want to share how it can be used.
The setup and harness
I'll be using an example from my wasm-wat-samples project for this post. In fact,
everything is already in place in the gc-print-scheme-pairs
sample. This sample shows how to construct Scheme-like...
Last week Thoughtworks released the 34th volume of our Technology Radar . This radar is our biannual survey of our experience of the technology scene, highlighting tools, techniques, platforms, and languages that we’ve used or otherwise caught our eye. This edition contains 118 blips, each briefly describing our impressions of one of these elements.
As we would expect, the radar is dominated by AI-oriented topics. Part of this is revisiting familiar ground with LLM-assisted eyes:
An...
It's been one of those months, and by that, I mean one of the 663 months since I was born. This won't be a long post, because I only have two things to say. First, I'm really glad we re-ordered the GMI (Guaranteed Minimum Income) rural study counties so Mercer County, WV, my Dad's county, went first in October 2025. I knew dad was close to the end, and sure enough, that was the last time I ever saw him. You can kinda sorta meet my dad on this page, if you want to. Why Pledge to Share the Amer...
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
11:15 – What… what are we doing?
Recorded in Sydney, Australia. Licence for this track: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 . Attribution: Ruben Schade.
Released April 2026 on The Overnightscape Underground , an Internet talk radio channel focusing on a freeform monologue style, with diverse and fascinating hosts; this one notwithstanding. Hosted graciously by the Internet Archive .
Subscribe with iTunes , Pocket Casts , Overcast or ...
A week or so ago, I talked about how I might have killed my Framework 13 by dumping a full mug of coffee over it while it was running.
In that last post I explained how I'd stripped the laptop down and was waiting for some isopropyl alcohol (IPA) to be delivered so I could more thoroughly clean it. Well dear reader, the IPA turned up, I cleaned it as best I could, and left it for 24 hours to dry off.
The next day I came back to it, re-assembled it and hit the power button with a fair amoun...
… everything.
I need to know less, but I know more.
Trying to cultivate a life which allows me to know less while still participating in society requires me to know more and do more than simply laying back and passively allowing the unending flood of information to drown me.
Please note that we are all being drowned.
What is it that is drowning us?
Information and misinformation. Part of the drowning is the effort required to try to distinguish between the two. You’re try...
I’ve written a lot of longer blog posts lately, time to get back into the classic “Nate talks about the thing he just read about and finds neat.” So, without further ado, I just read about NMail ( github ) - and I think it’s neat. In fact, I think it’s actually one of the most interesting decentralized communication tools I’ve seen in a while.
Email is still king
Email is still the king of communication - according to Wikipedia, 50 million non-spam emails are sent every day. Wh...
Gimkit cosmetics are visual items players earn by answering questions in 2D game modes. They cover character skins called Gims, particle trails, and lobby stickers. None of them affect scores or gameplay speed. Gimkit released the first cosmetics on April 12, 2022, and the system has grown steadily since then with Packs added in March 2025.
What Are Gimkit Cosmetics and How Do They Work?
Cosmetics work through XP earned in Gimkit 2D game modes . Every 1,000 XP moves a player up one level, ...
Supermarkets charge manufacturers slotting fees for shelf space,
paying premium rates for eye-level placement and end-cap displays.
A product placed at eye level is there because its manufacturer paid for the position,
not because it is the best option in its category,
but consumers have no way to know this.
The US Federal Trade Commission investigated slotting fees in 1989 and again in 2000;
both times it concluded that the practice harmed competition and hurt small producers
without benefiting...
Michael Rabin passed away on April 14, 2026 at the age of 94. (Scott Aaronson has also blogged about his passing, see here .) I had many points to make about him; however, the first one got so long that I will just do that one for today's blog post. Rabin is an extremely well-rounded \(\ldots\) computer scientist? Computer scientist seems too narrow, and the point of this point is that he was well rounded. So I will start this thought again. The following is an extremely important questi...
